Chris Olstrom is a hobbyist programmer, and a (fairly) long-time Debian addict.

The Bonus Pack

Rather than forking off, and creating yet another distro bloated with things that the author thought were interesting, and often of no use to most users, I took a different approach, and just wrote a simple bash-script to install all the things I would have wanted in a distribution.

Efficiency (laziness) was also a motive for this method. Who wants to maintain a complete distribution, keep a repository up-to-date, and more, when those things have already been done?

Frustration with the "<debian-based-distro> is not Debian, so go away, we're not helping you." mentality of #debian was a contributing factor to the decision to use a simple script. Why not maintain 100% compatibility with Debian, by using only things found in the Official repositories?

Thus, the bonuspack was created. A shellscripted metadistribution, it gives the user a fully functional, semi-bloated system out-of-the-box, with minimal hassle, and (due to it being a simple script), maximum flexibility.

<dpkg> bonuspack is Chris Olstrom's Recommended Packages, a collection of packages that he has deemed to be 'not full of suck', whatever that means. Apparently, he can't even form a coherent sentence, and he uses Sid, so using his script is probably a bad idea. You can find it here: https://chris.olstrom.com/software/shellscript/debian_recommended/